Mark Rylance makes a galvanizing return to the London stage as the 19th century Hungarian surgeon whose work on antiseptics ultimately saved the lives of countless new mothers and newborns.
The haunted, messianic Semmelweis couldn’t be more different to Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, the antic lord of misrule Rylance reprised in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem last year, 13 years after originating the role. Both are heroically flawed outsiders, though, prone to self-sabotage. That Rylance has recently revealed in an interview that he initially took a garlic solution rather than a vaccine to counter Covid somehow adds a perverse piquancy to the evening.
Where Jerusalem was all mysticism and myth, this is a linear story of scientific discovery and a statement of the bleeding obvious: that a smug, male-dominated medical profession has been bad for women. Anna Müller (formidable, beady-eyed Pauline McLynn), head nurse of the obstetric ward of Vienna’s pre-eminent hospital, knows women are less likely to die of “child-bed fever” if treated by midwives than doctors. But it falls to Semmelweis and his cohorts to trace the cause to hygiene, and to try and persuade the resistant hierarchy of that fact.
Tom Morris’s urgent, pacy production juxtaposes disputative doctors with an all-female string quartet and a septet of ballerinas who give physical expression to joy, pain, mental anguish and death. The action seeps into the auditorium: we’re enlisted, or implicated.
The story unfolds in flashback from Pest in Hungary where Semmelweis and his wife Maria (a very moving Amanda Wilkin) are expecting a child. Metaphor alert! He thinks 10 steps ahead of her when playing chess and dives into the frozen Danube rather than skating over it like everyone else. Maria is at least a fully realised character. The doomed working girls – plus one aristocrat – stiffly played by the dancers, are not.
The play, first staged last year at Bristol Old Vic, was Rylance’s idea and he takes a subsidiary credit for the script alongside writer Stephen Brown. It was apparently written pre-pandemic, but some lines must surely have snuck in afterwards. “I have told my friends to invest in bleach!” declares Daniel York Loh’s senior medic. There are endless contemporary resonances for the doctors’ culture of denial. More interestingly, the script asks questions about truth and compromise. Semmelweis neglects his dying father and pregnant wife for the greater good, but his absolutism destroys him.
Designer Ti Green supplies a set of mobile operating tables and a backstage viewing gallery: the script reminds us that autopsy means “to see for yourself”. Rylance’s Semmelweis traces scalpel slices on his own body, one of many exquisite details in a performance full of fluttery tics, shiftily oblique glances and stutters. He is magnetic throughout, offset by mild, understated turns from Jude Owusu, Ewan Black and Felix Hayes as Semmelweis’s exasperated colleagues, and the ever-reliable Alan Williams as their boss, Klein.
Choreographer Antonia Franceschi works in some dance moves for Rylance with Chrissy Brooke as the dead girl who prompts his quest. He’s not bad at that, either. The ending is rushed and clumsy but it doesn’t matter. One of our finest, alchemically instinctive actors is back where he belongs: onstage.
Booking to 7 Oct, haroldpintertheatre.co.uk
